(insert a variety of stressed-out Alexei noises)

I’m fronting today. Which is NOT what I want, for several reasons.

First of all, it’s our system’s therapy day today.

Perhaps surprising to some, me not wanting to front (especially in therapy) today is NOT because I’m running away from my own things I need to work on…at least, not consciously, like most times.

Nope.

Today I don’t want to front in therapy because I’m the ass who keeps blocking alters from getting the help they need. Not all of it is intentional. Until a few months ago, I COMPLETELY suppressed the alters who have certain “memories” which are in the process of being sorted out a bit more [dna test has been submitted, and we’ll see what happens from here]. I’m still unconsciously suppressing them, because their “memories” terrify me.

With that situation, I’m terrified both of being right and of being wrong. And being a system makes it inevitable that both outcomes will happen regardless [some being correct and others incorrect]…but until we have more information, we honestly can’t say for certain. I personally still choose to believe that this nonsense about us being somehow taken from France when we were between the ages of 1 and 2 to be an escapism fantasy. Do I know where the fuck we got some of the weirdly specific details about one particular residential neighborhood? Not concretely. But I can think of a ton of possibilities as to how it might have happened.

Thinking about being an actual stolen or otherwise moved about and internationally adopted child freaking terrifies me. It brings up feelings of failure. Of hurt. Of pain. [some in my system would use this as an opportunity to share that I had an emdr experience that brought up memories of “being at-fault” for getting separated from our family…but I personally can still explain this away as a time where we may truly have been separated from our family. And maybe even in the context of me wandering off or such. But kids wandering off and getting briefly separated from family in a crowded environment is honestly very common. So this doesn’t feel as “nail in the coffin” for me as it does to others in my system]

But this isn’t even the suppressing of alters I’m worried about today. No…as of yesterday, I figured out that I’ve also been suppressing other alters as well.

Alters who need help. Who…terrify me in a whole other aspect.

I don’t want to go into details until after bringing it up with our therapist. What I hate most is the fact that I know this won’t be the first time we have brought some of our suspicions up with them. I think it’s actually the third or fourth time even…but who knows with amnesia and all of that?

The time I remembering talking to them about these suspicions, I was able to reassure myself that no-that suspicion doesn’t seem to cover the things I personally was aware of, so I shrugged it off. But I should’ve realized that I didn’t feel relief or reassurance in the matter…I simply was like “welp, that doesn’t sound like what I currently know” and being the brilliant [sarcasm] alter I am, I completely forgot/ignored/didn’t think to check in on the alters who were actually experiencing the things???

“Well, how did you manage to do that unconsciously?” you may ask.

I may not know with 100% certainty [bc I have not had time nor motivation to thoroughly study exactly how each individual brain with DID handles such things…even if such a research task was able to be accomplished], but I have a theory (a SYSTEM theory! – Gabriel)

I honestly think it was BECAUSE I was suppressing them already. The experiences these alters have make my “needs to have a plan for every and any thing” brain go into overdrive, and skyrockets my anxiety and stress about being about to function “like a normal person” and take care of our system’s share of responsibilities in our life…and so I “tuned them out”.

With innerworld symbology, this action became a bit more intense. I trapped many alters in various containers, ranging from coffins to pods filled with liquid amber. And while they were tucked out of the way like that, these experiences mostly toned down. Definitely enough for us not to notice…or at least enough for the amnesia and dissociation to make us forget if we did notice.

Anyway, these alters were talking about some of their experiences over the course of our life with our wife/partner-system shortly before they (partner-system) had therapy. What I didn’t expect was for them to return from therapy and be like “so…it’s EXTREMELY IMPORTANT that you tell your therapist tomorrow [now today] about these things.”

Obviously I’m not upset that they talked about the conversation with their therapist. It was a lot of chaos for me, thinking that the experiences were just “scary parts of D.I.D.”, only to have our wife’s system be like “no…that is not something we’ve experienced, nor does that sound neuro-typical.” With the strangeness of the topics we brought up, and the fact that we’re a big and important part of their life, it makes perfect sense that they brought the conversation up in their therapy yesterday…

But from everything I’ve heard them say about their therapist, I was not prepared for them to say how much their therapist stressed bringing the stuff up with our therapist today. In the approximate hour that they were off in therapy, we’d already mostly been able to go “ha ha…funny stressful scary parts of D.I.D.” with the matters again.

Honestly, I currently feel like the thought of bringing all of the things up in therapy today is silly and unneeded. [We still plan to…but I want to stress how weird and surreal the situation as a whole feels to me right now. Like…it feels like our brain, and especially “my part” of it is doing everything to mask these things and make us all forget that they exist]

Unless the alters actually front, or we actually LOOK AT the memories where these experiences occurred [rather than a brief glance before moving on], it feels like everything is just some story. To me, it feels even less important and worthy of acknowledgement than the stupid French “memories”, even though in the moment it’s far MORE distressing.

I actually just sent a text message to our therapist [I’m really fucking glad they allow for such], to say that Break and I specifically need to NOT be allowed to do our “evade the big/scary thing and talk about any and everything else under the sun” thing that both of us have a knack for pulling when either of us are insanely stressed about certain types of things.

We’ll definitely hate that we did that when therapy time comes around. We’ll likely cuss ourselves out a few times between now and then even. Because if we hadn’t given our therapist that heads up, we could have successfully pushed all of this off until some nebulous future time.

If it had just been Break, maybe that’s how it would have proceeded yet. They don’t often remember to think through the full situation, though. After all, there’s a pretty good chance that when they get home from work, our wife/partner-system will ask us about therapy and how bringing these things up went.

And I don’t want to disappoint and worry them by saying that we didn’t talk about it. [I know it would by far be more the worry side…but my own self will deem that as a failure and disappointment, as my first goal in life tends to be “make sure our wife/partner-system has to worry as little as possible”]

…blah. I honestly kinda hate the fact that in order to truly accomplish my goals, I have to…take care of myself. Do self-care. Talk to the therapist and doctor people about things like what we need to go into today. Other such things that I would rather push aside “in order to focus on them more”.

It’s really fucking weird to be so important and necessary to someone I care about so much that they need me to take care of myself in order to best help them. That…isn’t something I’m used to [which honestly says a lot, but I already have dozens of irons in the fire, so I’m going to ignore THAT one for a bit longer].

One thing at a time.

And today’s thing is the current top priority.

-Alexei